ZTE makes bigger push into smartphone market

Premium-Inhalt.
China's ZTE, which has made big gains in mobile phone market, aims to boost its smartphone sales in 2011 by five times.

LG attempts smartphone comeback with focus on tech

Premium-Inhalt.
LG Electronics expects to sell more than 30 million smartphones this year, a fourfold increase over 2010, when it stumbled by being late to catch on to the smartphone trend.

Have Derivatives Been 'Fixed' for Corporate Use? Not Quite

Premium-Inhalt.
CFOs should see little change in their ability to use over-the-counter derivatives under the new regulatory regime mandated by the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, some industry experts say. They may, however, pay more for the privilege. And contrary to the promise of Dodd-Frank supporters, they may see little benefit from the much-touted transparency the new regulations are designed to bring to the market.

Nokia – Microsoft deal a bold move: Ovum

Premium-Inhalt.
Research house Ovum believes last week's announced partnership between Nokia and Microsoft is "a bold move, but absolutely the right one".

APEJ CIOs scale corporate hierarchy

Premium-Inhalt.
Return on Investment (ROI)-led transformative business projects will eventually move the CIO up the corporate hierarchy, according to a newly released report "IDC Asia/Pacific (Excluding Japan) IT Services Top 10 Predictions: ROI-Led Transformation in the Emerging Asia Enterprise to Drive IT Services Spend"

High Prices Threaten to Kill Tablet Adoption

Premium-Inhalt.
This sounds like a grouchy (and obvious) question, but are tablet computers too expensive? Are high prices going to push the nascent tablet computing platform into a nose dive it can't recover from?

Music games are dead, long live music games

Premium-Inhalt.
While Activision Blizzard's shedding of the Guitar Hero franchise earlier this week was monumental, in some ways, I wasn't surprised. Acitivision Blizzard is the most 'business-first' publisher in the video game industry, and as NPD reports month after month have attested to, music games are . So Guitar Hero is gone, and Rock Band, given . While some say this crash was unavoidable, I vehemently disagree. Lack of innovation and focus got the genre into this mess, and a surplus will be needed to save it.

Is Google corrupt? Search me

Premium-Inhalt.
Over the weekend, the New York Times published a long piece by David Segal describing in painful detail exactly by JCPenney. Over the holiday shopping season, the retailer where my mother used to drag me to buy my Easter suits received an extraordinary bounty of Google love, ranked number one in searches for "dresses," "bedding," "area rugs," "furniture," "skinny jeans," and dozens of other terms (including, probably, "Easter suits").

Tron Bicycle Makes Push Bikes Cool Again

Premium-Inhalt.
Do you remember GeekTech's post about the available on eBay? You possibly also remember the hefty price tag too. Fortunately, a member of the Instructables community has come up with an idea to make you own cycle glow for less of the price.

Greythorn gives free iProfile to IT job seekers

Premium-Inhalt.
IT recruitment firm Greythorn will providing its candidates with a free iProfile online resume.

Green memories accelerate ROI for data centers

Premium-Inhalt.
This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter's approach.

iWeb update fixes FTP publishing issue, more

Premium-Inhalt.
While Apple's was certainly the major news from Cupertino on Tuesday, Apple also released a small update to its iWeb Web-publishing software.

Asphalt 6: Adrenaline for iOS

Premium-Inhalt.
from is a high-end, graphically-intensive, and content-rich car racing game. Asphalt 6 allows you to race and modify cars such as the Audi RSS, BMW Z4, the Tesla Roadster Sport (a personal favorite), and the Abarth 500 SS. You can race the cars in exotic locations such as Nassau, Bahamas; Charmonix, France; Cape Town, South Africa; or Havana, Cuba.

Telstra to sell HTC's next-generation Desire S Android phone

Premium-Inhalt.
Telstra has confirmed it will bring the next generation HTC Desire smartphone -- the HTC Desire S -- to Australia in the first half of 2011.

Google's Android Roadmap: New Clues Emerge

Premium-Inhalt.
Here in the Android-watching world, the air has smelled of uncertainty for quite some time. Ever since Google announced , the tablet-optimized edition of its mobile OS, there's been no shortage of questions about the platform's future and the direction in which it's headed.

Yahoo CTO on what it takes to compete

Premium-Inhalt.
Since his appointment as Yahoo's CTO last June, Raymie Stata has been on an intense ride. He is part of the executive team charged with building Yahoo's technology strategy and spurring innovation to drive growth and attract more users to the site. Stata has been with Yahoo since 2004 and was previously its chief architect. Other members of the team include Chief Scientist Prabhakar Raghavan and Stata's boss, Chief Product Officer Blake Irving, both of whom report to CEO Carol Bartz.

RascomStar-QAF, ViaSat launch rural GSM system

Premium-Inhalt.
RascomStar-QAF, Africa's satellite operator, has partnered with ViaSat to provide a low-power, integrated GSM backhaul system designed to allow operators to push services to rural areas at lower costs than ever before.

Testing the cloud

Premium-Inhalt.
"Identify a high value application that you have within the business and start there," is the key advice Kirsten Wolberg, CIO of Salesforce.com has, for enterprises making the initial moves from on-premise apps to the cloud environment."If you are actually working with an application that adds a lot of value really quickly and is important to the business, it is a really good business case to show the power and flexibility of the applications," says Wolberg, in an interview at the recent Dreamforce conference in San Francisco where she was one of the speakers.Peter Coffee, head of platform research, Salesforce.com, echoes her advice. "I don't want you to replace anything that is working well enough for you [and] generating good ROI," says Coffee. "Take about 20 applications that some VPs in the company really, really wish will be right for him or her that you have not been able to deliver. If [you] can take the wish list of five VPs and do the top two items on the list, that is 10 apps you can probably write in six months in force.com," says Coffee. "All of a sudden, those five VPs no longer think of you as a cost centre to be minimised but instead think of you as a value partner to be nurtured and to be given more resources. That is a much more attractive environment for the CIO to be in."Wolberg and Coffee say cloud technology provides opportunities for CIOs to become more strategic, and downplay concerns it will diminish the role. "Every major change within any industry puts people at risk and those who succeed are those who change with or are ahead of the change, as opposed to those who fight it," says Wolberg. "It [the shift to the cloud] is a great opportunity for CIOs to be more involved in the strategy of the company and not just focusing on the technology side of the business. I see it as a fantastic opportunity for CIOs to define the value they add to the organisation. It will allow CIOs to have more strategic conversations with their executive peers."Cloud computing, she says, is "fundamentally a shift in the change to how values are being delivered in enterprises and as a CIO. You can fight it, but ultimately you [as] the CIO will end up losing. But if you embrace it and you figure out how your role is changing and embrace these new technologies and help this organisation, that is how the CIO can be more successful."Coffee, on the other hand, says it would be a mistake to think a move to the cloud is a "daring exercise in risk taking". He says from the experiences of the early adopters who spoke at the conference, the cloud is "making their lives simpler and less exciting so they can focus on business benefits".He says the CIO role is not being made redundant as more enterprises move to the cloud because "now, the CIO is a value-creation partner to the business rather than being a cost centre"."CIOs are made redundant when the work they do is easily outsourceable. And if all you are doing is running the email and keeping the server farm running, you are very outsourceable. But if you are running a team of business process engineers who are out there in the business units everyday, actively working with people to solve their problems, that is not outsourceable. That is the kind of thing you want an in-house IT team to do."

Remains of the Day: Love is in the air

Premium-Inhalt.
Love is in the air, and STDs are in... well, you know where. Your reminder for Monday, February 14, 2011 is that it's Valentine's Day. Your remainders are as follows:g "

Master builder

Premium-Inhalt.
In a long and varied ICT career, Bruce Tinsley has served industries ranging from banking through dairying and in several countries, before his current post as CIO for , the civil engineering consultancy that sprang from the Ministry of Works.At points in his career, he made a deliberate effort not to be "typecast" as a specialist in one business field or another. He has also been careful to broaden his business expertise, taking an MBA and carefully acquainting himself with the processes and priorities of each new business, before advancing ideas on how ICT can improve matters.His first job in ICT was at Databank, starting in 1981 as a trainee analyst-programmer working in assembler code. It took some learning at first, "but I quickly realised that was what I wanted to do," says Tinsley, who is based in Wellington. "Early in my time at Databank, I thought 'this is my career for life'."The attraction was not so much the programming, even then, but "designing systems, using these tools to help business to make things happen".The hope in the 80s and 90s was that code generators would make programming obsolete "You'd just need to do the business analysis; put the detail into a model and all your programs would be developed for you, we were told. It seems there is still a great demand even for COBOL programmers," Tinsley says."To that extent, I question whether the promises of computing to the business have been realised. In other respects, they' have been hugely exceeded. Tools like the iPad, the growth in ability to communicate, the ability to share information, have far exceeded anybody's expectations from [the 1980s]."A lot of the growth has been consumer driven and the push for business to build on that base is a two-edged sword, Tinsley says."I see it driving quite a bit of demand. People are coming to me and saying 'But Bruce, I can do this at home; why can't I do it at work? I can set up a blog, build a website and create applications; why does it take [the IT department] so long to implement or upgrade anything'?"Some things don't scale well from home to the corporate environment and it's part of the challenge of a CIO to communicate that to management and staff, he says."During my time at Fonterra, the procurement manager asked me 'Why can't we use Skype?' I said 'would you do all your procurements through TradeMe and eBay?' It's a matter of understanding the difference between the consumer and the commercial environment -- and being able to sell that."He spent 10 years at Databank, in a variety of roles. "That was one thing that fascinated me about IT; you could move on from role to role and continue to grow."His first move was to ANZ-Postbank in applications development, IT strategy and a major bank transformation programme. "In virtually every country we did things a different way; different systems, processes, support functions. The global transformation project was around consistent processes, technologies and so on in all operating locations."Tinsley led the New Zealand side of the programme from the IT perspective. When he left ANZ in 1999 and joined Azimuth Consulting, he was partway through an MBA. "I was looking for a way to grow as an IT person. I realised I needed more business knowledge and wider experience. Azimuth immediately sent me to the Philippines, to work with PLDT, the country's leading telco."That was good for a whole bunch of reasons. It got me used to working with external clients and it got me out of banking where I had been for 20 years. A recruiter in Wellington said 'Bruce, you're typecast. People will only look at you as a banking IT person.' So I went straight to a telco." After 18 months' project work, he and a colleague were assigned to guide the CIO in implementing a new strategy."That gave me the nudge to realise this CIO lark was pretty good. It gave me the impetus to move into a more strategic IT role, running my own shop."Work in Malaysia and Korea followed, taking him back into banking but also giving him more experience of major organisational transformations. Returning here in 2005, he became chief technology officer for Fonterra; "I was responsible for infrastructure strategy and architecture. We had outsourced all our infrastructure management to EDS. A large part of my job was managing that new technology development. "In 2007, I saw an opportunity at PGG Wrightson as CIO. Again this was a transformational role. PGG had gone through the merger with Wrightson and had combined the two IT operations. They needed a significant review of capability and rationalisation of applications and infrastructure."We migrated off an old general ledger and implemented JD Edwards; we did CRM and data warehouse. We rebuilt the infrastructure and things were going swimmingly until the economic downturn. I had to reduce staff and cancel capital projects. It wasn't a situation I was keen on. So I left. I did a short-term consulting stint with Downers, in Auckland. Then 12 months ago, I got approached to take on this role."The challenges at Opus are similar to those at PGG Wrightson and the Malaysian bank, he says; "to look at the way we operate and make some quite significant changes."Our ICT infrastructure has developed incrementally over time, but without a real strategy. Our organisational structure is very decentralised; regional IT staff report to regional managers, not to myself. I have been working with management and regional IT managers looking at how we reshape IT support."Opus (number 48 in the report on the top IT using organisations in New Zealand) has expanded rapidly, particularly in overseas work. "If growth patterns continue, in five years' time we will have more people offshore than we do in New Zealand," Tinsley says. "We'll be double the size we are now. We have to make sure the business processes and infrastructure are in place to support continued growth and a whole change in operating environment."Looking back over his career, there have been similarities and significant differences in each new business area."The transition from banking to telco was not as big as I thought it would be. They both process large volumes of transactions every day. Fonterra was totally different. It was manufacturing, supply-chain and logistics - and my first real exposure to a large international operation based in New Zealand."PGG Wrightson was a big retail operation; it had probably more strings to its bow than any company I have ever worked for," he says.Coming to Opus was a different game again; being a project-oriented, professional services company in the engineering space. "You have to spend time learning those differences when you first come onto the job," Tinsley says.But fundamentally there is a common thread: "It is about provision of IT services to the business and strategic growth issues; you are hopefully seen as an advisor to the business in terms of how IT can be used in a strategic fashion."Hopefully" doesn't sound an optimistic word, CIO suggests. "I don't want to talk out of school," Tinsley replies, "but in a couple of roles I have had, people have not been willing to listen; to them IT is a commodity service provider. All they want is for me to ensure the machine on the desk works and bandwidth is sufficient to give them a decent response time. They don't look for strategic value out of IT. "That comes back to one of the key roles of the CIO; selling the IT value proposition -- that we are more than just PCs on desks; we are about providing a strategic capability to organisations."A key element of his approach is engagement with business general management, he says. "I have spent a lot of this year travelling around New Zealand and Australia, meeting with managers and staff, understanding what they do. I have also met a number of my peers in the industry, for instance the guys at and at " This helps make sure when that when the companies are collaborating on a project, the total team can work together and communicate information, he says.Opus has bases in New Zealand, Australia, the UK and Canada. "We have IT teams in each. At the moment they're set up to support their regions. I believe [that's] quite an inefficient model; we have excess capability in some areas and we don't have the capability in all regions in other areas. All up, I've got about 50 IT people worldwide.The challenge for me is how we make more efficient and effective use of them. We are working through that process at present."In the formal structure of the organisation, Tinsley reports to the chief financial officer -- a structure that is often criticised as distancing IT from top management. The reality at Opus is different, Tinsley says"If I want to talk to the chief exec I can just go and knock on his door. Hierarchically I am separated, but in terms of communication I am not. One good thing is that our CFO is very technology-literate and keen to drive the strategic agenda as well."While IT should be close to the business, there is danger in letting the distinction fade completely, he says.The conduct of IT operations demands rigour around process -- change management and capacity planning, the good operational disciplines; if you start embedding that out in the business you lose the potential for those good practices to continue and to be driven centrally."If you devolve responsibility you start losing control. It can be like herding cats; especially with the growth of IT knowledge among the engineers in this business."What advice would he offer to IT practitioners aspiring to a CIO role?"Understand the business, know what drives it. Learn about the financial and business drivers; learn about marketing, learn about business operations and driving efficiency."I came to this a bit late myself," he admits; his first major move was the MBA. "I think I spent my first years at Databank almost in ignorance of what the banks actually did and the underlying processes that utilised the technology. I was focused on the technology itself. Anyone who wants to be a CIO absolutely has to understand what it is that drives the business to succeed." Another piece of advice: "know the IT industry. You don't have to know how to pull a PC to bits to be a CIO; in some ways I think that is a detriment. It is knowing the various components of the industry -- operations, infrastructure, applications, the strategy component, project and programme management. There are a whole lot of things that happen within IT and if you want to be a CIO you have to understand what they are and how they interact with each other."The other thing is: know your peers -- in similar industries and in the vendor arena -- because for better or worse they're the people you'll grow with throughout your career. I see people I met 30 years ago who have risen through the ranks alongside me. It is remarkable how many I still keep engaging with, especially in the New Zealand market."

Making the Most of Your Photo's Bokeh

Premium-Inhalt.
Photographers spend a lot of time eliminating blur from their photos. Auto-focus, vibration reduction, tripods... all of these things help us get sharper images. But blur can be good too--especially in the background, so we can lead the viewer's eye back to the subject in the foreground. Last week, in "," I explained that blur itself comes in different flavors. This quality, known as bokeh, makes some blur more aesthetically pleasing than others. This week, let's wrap up the discussion of blur and bokeh with some tips on how to vary and improve the blur in your own photos.

IBM's Watson's ability to converse is a huge advance for AI research

Premium-Inhalt.
IBM's has been touted by some observers to be one of the biggest computing advancements in the past several decades.

Finding the needles in a log file haystack

Premium-Inhalt.
You have just been presented with a daunting task: Here are several gigabytes of log files; let us know if they can tell you anything.

Juniper up next with cloud switches

Premium-Inhalt.
Juniper's announcement next week is expected to include switches based on new silicon that allows them to establish a flat fabric for .

InMobi pushes for consolidation and expansion in Africa

Premium-Inhalt.
InMobi's new director of Africa operations faces the tough task of coming up with a growth strategy for the mobile advertising network in a region where, though economic expansion has boosted the number of end users, competition is fierce.

Duke Nukem Forever to Use Controversial Steamworks

Premium-Inhalt.
I'm not really surprised Duke Nukem Forever's going to use Steamworks for both single and multiplayer modes when it ships for PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 on May 3. I still have mixed feeling about Steam, in part because it means other online resellers will probably pass carrying the game, but also because it means Steam has to be running, which presents its own problems. I rarely have trouble with the service to be fair, but when I do, and it pops up error messages like "We're sorry, Steam's not available right now," I want to punch the screen.

E-discovery: How a Law Firm Slashes Time and Costs

Premium-Inhalt.
It's no secret that corporations are drowning in data. IDC estimates the volume of computer data worldwide will reach 1.2 million petabytes during 2011. A November, 2010 Gartner study found data growth was one of the top three challenges for data center managers at 47 percent of large enterprises.

IBM makes its zEnterprise 196 mainframe friendlier

Premium-Inhalt.
IBM's latest mainframe, the zEnterprise 196, was as a cross-platform management system that could work in mixed processor and operating system environments. In pursuit of that goal, the company continues to roll out new components.

Asus U41JF: Average Performance, Cheap-Looking

Premium-Inhalt.
Asus' ultrathin U41JF is designed to be both powerful and portable, with a chassis around one inch thick and a Nvidia graphics card. Unfortunately, the entire notebook looks cheap, despite obvious attempts to make it look otherwise. This notebook has all the right parts, from the brushed-aluminum cover to the chiclet-style keyboard and fancy graphics card (though no processor or Blu-ray drive), but it's still very obviously a budget machine.

Governments turn to technology in post-disaster review

Premium-Inhalt.
The Federal Attorney-General, Robert McClelland, has signalled a growing role for social media and other communication technologies to play in helping governments manage natural disasters.

BlackBerry: Customize 'In-Holster' Call, Alert Settings

Premium-Inhalt.
Did you know that certain Research In Motion (RIM) and third-party holsters, cases and pockets are designed to work along with your BlackBerry smartphone to not only protect it from damage, but to save you battery and offer custom "in-holster" notifications and alerts?

Are the iPad 2 HD Rumors for Real?

Premium-Inhalt.
The much anticipated iPad 2 hasn't even hit Apple Stores, while a new rumor about an iPad 3 arriving in time for the holidays began swirling around the blogosphere recently. Two iPads in the same year? What's going on? Does this rumor carry much weight?

Google Web Toolkit adds HTML5 canvas backing

Premium-Inhalt.
Google and JetBrains are offering on Monday technology upgrades in the HTML5 and PHP application development spaces respectively with Google upgrading GWT (Google Web Toolkit) and JetBrains adding to its PHP IDE.

MacDropAny 1.4.2

Premium-Inhalt.
If you haven't noticed by now, we , the combination of app and Web service that seamlessly syncs data between your Macs, the cloud, other Dropbox-configured computers, and even your iOS devices. Which is why we're --we're working on a series about getting even more out of the service. Consider this the first installment of that series, because today's Gem offers a simple way to add functionality to Dropbox.

Apple's Subscription Plans May Hurt Some Services

Premium-Inhalt.
Although on the iPhone and iPad is ostensibly aimed at magazine and newspaper publishers, non-publication apps will also be affected.

Wicked cool man vs. machine moments

Premium-Inhalt.
As IBM's for its this week, we are reminded that this is the first in a long series of classic man vs. machine moments. Here we have a look at some of the famous real and not so real man vs. machine action.

Vendors race to protect data in cloud security services

Premium-Inhalt.
At the RSA Conference today, two industry titans laid out what appear to be competing efforts to build an array of controls for cloud-based service providers.

Windows zero-day surfaces as researcher releases attack code

Premium-Inhalt.
A security researcher yesterday disclosed a new unpatched bug in Windows that some experts believe could be used to remotely hijack a PC.

Adobe Ideas app now offers premium layers feature, more

Premium-Inhalt.
Adobe apparently has some new ideas for , the company's iOS vector-drawing app. A new update adds a premium layers feature, improved panning and zooming, and support for Apple's VGA adapter.

HTC's Flyer May Be a Standout in Crowded Tablet Market

Premium-Inhalt.
I got a close up look at the new at an HTC event here at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Dell results boosted by enterprise sales

Premium-Inhalt.
Dell on Tuesday reported a 177 percent year-over-year increase in net income for its fourth fiscal quarter of 2011, driven by growth in enterprise server and PC sales.